It's the 1ate 1950s and Shayne's reporter friend Tim Rourke is on vacation in a Latin American country with a corrupt government when he meets a beautiful blonde claiming to have hot information.

Shayne is at the airport to meet Rourke, who acts out of character. Then Rourke is kidnapped while the girl disappears and Shayne is left with a lot of questions and a typewriter.

The story is okay, it's not as good as the other two Shayne mysteries I've read, but Halliday provides your expected dose of mayhem, danger, and beautiful blondes.

This one suffered for having Shayne out of the picture for the first 30 percent of the book. Rourke isn't a fun point of view character. Plus in the middle of the book, Rourke gets kind of drunk and those scenes read like poor imitation of Craig Rice's Mr. Malone. The solution is all a bit unsurprising and it wasn't well set up.

Overall, Mike Shayne is still good and it's not a bad read, but Halliday had produced far better books than this one.

Rating: 3.0 out of 5.0

The copy I read plus another Michael Shayne mystery are available on request with the first donation received of $50 or more for listeners in the US or Canada. See details here.

If you enjoyed this post, you can have new posts about Detective stories and the golden age of radio and television delivered automatically to your Kindle.

This post contains affiliate links, which means that items purchased from these links may result in a commission being paid to the author of this post at no extra cost to the purchaser.

Welcome to the Great Detectives of Old Time Radio. We will feature five of Old Time Radio's great detectives from the beginning of the career to the very last episode in existence with a new episode posted Monday-Friday.
In addition, every month, we'll post a public domain movie or TV mystery or detective show as a bonus.
Along the way, I'll provide you my commentary and offer you opportunities to interact. This is going to be fun and exciting. I hope you'll join me for the trip.
If you'd like to join the adventure with all the great shows that are featured as part of our line up, click here to add this podcast to your Itunes, click here to subscribe to this feed using any other feed reader.
If you'd like an even more in-depth experience, get our Iphones App from the Itunes store and get bonus episodes featuring the stars of our shows in non-Detective roles.
You can follow me on Twitter and become a fan on Facebook